Charities

Be Inspired | Charities | Microsoft Office 365: Discounts and Subscriptions for Charities

Microsoft Office 365: Discounts and Subscriptions for Charities

All charities need to be careful about their spending, especially when it comes to administration. For many, it’s a constant challenge to find areas where savings can be made while ensuring that everything works as it should and donations are maximised.

Getting it right means more cash available for the good cause that is being supported. Getting it wrong can quickly drain valuable resources.

One area where charities always look to make savings is on IT licences and supply. The good news is that cutting-edge packages like Microsoft 365 come with heavily discounted rates for charities in the UK

Microsoft Office 365 For Non-Profit Organisations

Microsoft has a pretty good track record of working with charities around the world, providing cut price IT solutions with superb functionality. It’s one of the reasons why Microsoft Office has long been the industry standard for all sorts of organisations. The vast improvement in technology with cloud-based services nowadays provides all users with an excellent range of highly useful tools that can be used absolutely anywhere.

Microsoft are currently offering either free or heavily discounted licences for non-profit organisations. There are two packages available for small and medium size charities:

Non-Profit Business Essentials: For charities that are simply looking for email provision, cloud storage and sharing facilities for files as well as excellent team working tools, the donation licence is free for up to 300 users. Staff are able to access Office 365 tools such as Word and Excel through web versions.
Non-Profit Business Premium: For charities that require desktop business applications such as Word and Excel as well as all the usability provided in the Essentials package, the premium business licence is just £1.50 per user per month. That’s a massive saving compared to the normal premium business package which is currently £9.40 per user per month.

For larger charities there are 3 different licences to choose from:

Non-Profit E1: Similar to the Business Essentials package, this is free, available for up to 2,000 users, and comes with web access for Word and Excel.
Non-Profit E3: This provides desktop Office applications as well as a host of useful elements such as web conferencing, work management tools as well as the chance to broadcast to over 10,000 people via the internet. The licence costs £4.00 per user per month and allows unlimited accounts.
Non-Profit E5: The top package is aimed at large charitable organisations that need better security such as data protection with DLP, higher level analytics and advanced eDiscovery tools. The licence is £8.00 per user per month.

The Benefits of Office 365 For Charities

Apart from the low cost of running Office 365 and all its elements for your charity, these licences come with a lot of other advantages that make them some of the most powerful IT packages on the market today.

Many charities have workers that are mobile and out in the field. Office 365 is cloud based technology which means that files and other information can be accessed on the go, wherever someone is located. Everything can be synched across multiple devices in real time, so an employee can update files any time they want. It makes communication much more fluid and team working highly efficient, independent of where staff are based.

Changing to a service like Office 365 is also highly cost effective. Cloud based tech means that you no longer need to have expensive hardware driving your IT system. It’s simple to migrate everything to the cloud and easy to maintain at a much lower cost. The other good news is that it’s also highly scalable – the service grows or even shrinks to meet your personal demands as a charity and adding more users couldn’t be simpler.

Of course, one thing that all organisations worry about, particularly charities, is the issue of security. Microsoft have a strong reputation for providing a highly secure environment for businesses and charities of all types to operate in. Not only will you have all the tools you need, you can be sure that your data is well protected with security systems regularly updated to handle all current risks.

Eligibility for Microsoft 365

To qualify for the non-profits discounts and free subscriptions you need to be registered as a charity in the UK. In England and Wales, this means you need to be registered with the UK Charity Commission. In Scotland it’s the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) and, in Northern Ireland, you have to be registered Charity Commission for Northern Ireland (CCNI).

Other non-profits need to be registered with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) as tax exempt.

Get a Free Audit Today

At Cyan Solutions we offer a comprehensive free audit to all charitable organisations. We’ll be able to look at your current provision and advise which licence plan is best for you. If you want to save money and streamline your IT, contact our team today to see how we can help.

Categories: Charities, Microsoft Office 365, News